The Chocolate Milk Debate: Does It Do A Body Bad?

By Beth Ricanati, M.D. for YouBeauty.com

Did you know that more than 75 percent of all milk offered to our kids in school is flavored?

That’s a lot of extra sugar for nothing. Every half-pint carton of flavored nonfat milk adds approximately an extra eight grams of sugar to children’s diet; so it’s possible to smuggle five extra pounds into a child’s diet through flavored milk alone during one year of school.

Sugary beverages are worrisome because of sugar’s known link to obesity. Studies show a link from added sugar to obesity that is independent of the rest of one’s diet and physical activity.

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Childhood overweight and obesity rates have doubled in the last two decades. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), nearly one child out of two is either overweight or obese. (Have you checked out your school playground recently, or perhaps the local mall? Stop and look at the kids around you!) This pandemic of childhood obesity has real and damaging health consequences. Think: hypertension, stroke, diabetes, pulmonary problems, bone and joint issues.

But here’s the scariest stat: This generation of children may be the first in our nation's history to have a shorter life span than their parents, largely in part to our obesity pandemic.

Many health organizations are weighing in on this topic. For example, The American Heart Association recommends a limit of no more than three sugary drinks per week.

These guidelines are not just for home, though. A growing number of schools have started to implement healthier choices for their students: Los Angeles, Berkeley, Calif., and Washington D.C., for example, have all banned flavored, sugared milk from their lunchrooms.

So if you’re packing your child[ren]'s lunch this year, or they are getting lunch at school, be mindful of what they’re drinking!

Water and plain milk are great options. And when it’s your turn to sign up for snack duty, bring fruit kebabs and skip the cupcakes. (They’re so easy to make: Load up wooden skewers with the fruit of your choice! My kids and I like to make them with grapes, watermelon, strawberries, pineapple and melon.)

Comments

[Curlee]

12:11 PM on 09/10/2011

Why all the continuous preaching about telling us what we should be drinking? It's not the "what" but the "how much". Like everything else in life, moderation is key. Having a 12 ounce can of soda, half pint of chocolate milk, or orange juice a day is nothing compared to the common sight of a kid always having a 20 ounce soda bottle in his reach.

[mojomilk]

10:59 AM on 09/10/2011

The Chocolate Milk Dilemma is making much news but there is a simple solution. Consider MojoMIlk (www.mojomilk.com), an all-natural chocolate milk mix that contains 60% fewer calories than leading brands and also delivers 10x more healthy probiotics than yogurt. This gives kids delicious chocolate milk, plus a healthy advantage....we can then encourage chocolate milk drinking!

[Guitarsandmore]

08:42 AM on 09/10/2011

The daily beverage of choice should be water. Water is what your body needs and in a perfect world it would be flowing from a pristine mountain spring. But in today's reality the best you might be able to get is recycled through reverse osmosis and hollow fiber technology.

Chocolate milk once a month. Water every day.

[Claudia Marek]

01:46 PM on 09/09/2011

The problem with fruit kabobs is they load the body with fructose which is sent to the liver and turned into trigylceride...food for those fat cells. Especially for the obese or overweight, fructose is more dangerous that sucrose (table sugar) which is only half fructose.

[alahnar]

06:34 PM on 09/11/2011

You're half-right. Fructose stripped of its fiber (read: juice, candy, HFCS) is more dangerous than table sugar. Fructose in its natural form (fruit, vegetables) is perfectly fine. It's true that there should be more of a focus on vegetables than fruit in a diet, but it's pure misinformation that you have that fruit is more dangerous than table sugar. Turn off Dr. Mercola; his ideas went south about 10 years ago.

[pc51]

01:18 PM on 09/09/2011

When I was in grade school in the 1960's we were given a half pint of chocolate milk every single morning around 10am. (We had a choice between white or chocolate - but everyone took chocolate) About 70 percent of those kids grew up to be obese adults. Chocolate milk as a "gateway" drug to obesity? Nice little insulin spike for us each and every weekday morning.